inertia

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. Physics The tendency of a body to resist acceleration; the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.

n. Resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change: the inertia of an entrenched bureaucracy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. The property of a body that resists any change to its uniform motion; equivalent to its mass.

n. In a person, unwillingness to take action.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. That property of matter by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to continue in motion, and in the same straight line or direction, unless acted on by some external force; -- sometimes called vis inertiæ. The inertia of a body is proportional to its mass.

n. Lack of activity; sluggishness; -- said especially of the uterus, when, in labor, its contractions have nearly or wholly ceased.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. Lack of activity; sluggishness; passiveness; inertness.

n. In physics, that property of matter by virtue of which it retains its state of rest or of uniform rectilinear motion so long as no foreign cause changes that state. Also called vis inertiæ (force of inertia).

n. In medicine, want of activity; sluggishness: a term especially applied to the condition of the uterus when it does not contract properly in parturition.

n. With regard to a plane or point, the sum of the elements of mass each multiplied by the square of its distance from the given plane or point.

Moreover, if birth rates were the whole story, then evangelical growth should have been visible between successive birth cohorts, not within them, but that is also not the case.37 Finally, the long-term inertia of demographic arithmetic should have continued to push up the evangelical share of the population for at least several decades more, even after the evangelical birth rate converged to the nonevangelical birth rate.

There is a certain inertia to poulation growth — mathematically described by Nathan Keyfitz — that means we cannot escape the short and intermediate term consequences of our demographic destinies even if vital rates were to improbably shift rapidly and in ways to offset current trends.

Ego, in this context, is defined as inertia -- an anti-evolutionary posture of narcissism and self-concern that is based upon the conviction, conscious or unconscious, that something fundamental is terribly, terribly wrong.